Turning the Tide

by Christine Stovell

  In time, Harry could see that Little Spitmarsh would flourish with more festivals, eating places and knick-knack shops and an artists’ quarter. Eventually the natives would have to drive somewhere else, a new out-of-town development, to buy their screws, their paint, their curtain hooks and their discounted clothes. Everyone would be looking for homes, and the planning department would allow more space to be gobbled up so that yet more people would move in, preventing the closure of local schools, stopping the brain drain and making the place somewhere its residents were proud of.

  All she hoped, she thought, making her way back to her house, was that Little Spitmarsh’s revival would not, as she feared, only be attuned to the visitor looking for gourmet foods, novelty shops and a self-consciously groovy ambience. At the rate its salty, raw and real past was being reinvented, even Matthew’s potential customers would settle for anything they could get. Would anyone still notice the silty tide creeping in and out of meandering creeks, the wind rustling the grasses and the birds whooping and calling in the setting sun? Would anyone even care?

  It was evening by the time Matthew had finished with everyone. He stood outside Harry’s front door and waited. Maybe she’d gone up for an early night? Thankful, but disappointed at the same time, he peered through the glass door, wondering if he should try the bell again. An inner door swung open and Harry appeared, making him feel as if he’d been caught doing something illicit. There was just time for him to register her expression; she looked pleasantly surprised, hopeful even, before she shut down and assumed her customary look of suspicion.

  ‘I’m not selling anything,’ he promised. ‘Can I come in?’

  Taking her turned back as consent, Matthew followed her into the large open-plan living space and felt the same jolt of pleasure and satisfaction he’d experienced the first time he’d walked in there.

  As she settled nervously in front of him, Matthew searched her face in the low light. Facially, the resemblance to the man he’d come to tell her about wasn’t immediate. Harry had obviously inherited her serious grey eyes and full mouth from her mother; but there were flashes in her expression and the way she held her head which were more obvious to him. Both carried a lot of strength in their slim frames.

  ‘What do you want, Matthew?’

  Not to be here, he wished for a moment; but someone had to tell her, and no one else was in a fit state to do it.

  ‘I’ve been over with George …’

  She went pale. ‘He’s not ill again, is he? He shouldn’t have been out in a boat so soon.’

  Matthew shook his head. ‘He’s fine.’

  Harry sat back, looking relieved. ‘Okay, what’s he done now then?’ she said, laughing. ‘Have I got to fire him again?’

  ‘No, no, nothing like that.’ Matthew shoved his hands through his hair. ‘He was very worried about you, though.’ He took a deep breath and tried to sound calm. ‘Harry, what do you know about your father’s death?’

  He felt awful when it took her a few seconds to compose herself. Eventually she let go of the breath she’d been holding. ‘Look, George can’t get in a state every time I take the boat out because of what happened to Dad. Everyone knows that sailors are vulnerable in small inflatable dinghies; tales of over-confident seamen taking chances in familiar stretches of water and coming to grief are legion.

  ‘Dad should have known better, but he took a risk; he wasn’t wearing a life jacket because he knew these waters like the back of his hand and he thought he could get away without basic safety precautions. Unfortunately, in those few seconds between climbing out of the dinghy and boarding the boat, he lost his footing and fell. Once he was in the water – well, you know how fast the tides are round here. He wouldn’t have been able to fight it. And then he was gone.’

  He watched as she brushed the tears away.

  ‘Sorry. You know, sometimes I just feel so angry with him for being so careless.’

  Matthew could feel his pulse thudding; how he wished he could just let her carry on being angry at the version of the past she was used to.

  She blew her nose and managed a weak smile. ‘Dad was careless; I’m not. George doesn’t need to worry.’

  He was still wondering where to start, when she shuffled forward in her seat as if to get to her feet. ‘I could do with a drink,’ she explained. ‘What about you?’

  Yep, that seemed like a much better idea; but he still needed to make her listen to him. He reached inside his jacket and took out the battered leather notebook. She stared at it for a minute and sank slowly back in her chair.

  ‘Oh my God! Where did you get that? It’s Dad’s logbook, isn’t it? I haven’t seen it for years; no one could find it after his death.’ She looked up at him, perplexed. ‘What are you doing with it?’

  Matthew’s heart ached for her, and his head ached for what he was about to do to her. ‘George recovered this from the boat after … after what happened to your father,’ he began. ‘He and your mother decided that it would be better for you, given how young you were, if you didn’t know the ins and outs of what really happened …’

  Harry was getting impatient. ‘Typical! I might have known that Mum had something to do with it. What right did she have to make judgements about what I could handle? Just because she couldn’t hack it! What could possibly have been so bad about his accident that I needed to be protected from it?’

  Suddenly her eyes went to the logbook and she stopped talking. Matthew watched as the relevance of its contents slowly began to dawn on her.

  ‘It wasn’t an accident, was it?’ she breathed very quietly.

  He tried to take her hand, but her arms were wrapped tightly round her body as she tried to shield herself from the hurt.

  ‘He was a very troubled man, a very torn man. He loved you and he loved your mother, but he’d just found something out that had broken him in two …’

  The colour had completely drained from her face and her mouth quivered with questions. He couldn’t stand sitting there, watching the pain wrack her small frame. He moved round the table and, as he went to place his arm round her stiff shoulders, she suddenly held out her hand.

  ‘Stop prevaricating, Matthew. Nothing you can do will change what’s written in that logbook. Just let me read it, will you?’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  How can any sailor bear the loss of the ship he has built to carry and serve him? My craft, I thought, was well constructed and true. Here, in this safe and secluded harbour of life, I believed I had made a solid and secure foundation for my young wife and our darling daughter, a ship, I believed, to serve me all my days. With enough rough weather behind me to set my mind at ease about the seaworthiness of the vessel, I hoped that I could look forward to a time when we would turn our faces to the sun and enjoy life to the full.

  I see now that my construction was always flawed. Like a drowning man, I look to its surface where all appears familiar, sturdy and durable, but it cannot save me now; I know the structure is unsound, fatally wounded by one storm too many and sinking before my eyes. That place of safety where I thought to shelter my wife and child was exposed and vulnerable before I even began. What good am I to them now? I was blind not to see that I could never be wholly there for them when I had left so much of myself − more even, than I knew − in a faraway land.

  The next passage is one that I shall make alone. The air was cold around me when I set out this morning, but the evening has been quite lovely and I am calm. Calypso sways to a gentle swell and I hear it begin. A whisper like the suggestion of a breeze. Ripples across the water. Closer, closer. The memories reach out to me.

  Lit by neon in the city you smile at me, the night fountains shimmering as you sweep your fingers through the spray. Early morning on the river, ever-changing like the waterfront, the rituals of the past, the shock of the new. The shock of love. White sheets, golden skin. And, as I prepare to slip the lines, I see your face.

  ‘How long have you known, Jimi?’ Ha
rry asked, as her half-brother silently handed the logbook back to her. From this angle it was hard to believe that it was true, that this dandy in his sloppy black cardigan and black skinny jeans was anything to do with her. The heavy hair flopping over his forehead was clearly inherited from his mother and she looked out too from his dark, slanting eyes. Yet something had effected a transformation, some of the strutting confidence had evaporated, making him seem more approachable, more familiar somehow. And when he turned to her, his expression agitated, she knew that he was feeling just as sick and churned up as she was. Divided loyalties. Family secrets. Still, that’s what they had come to sort out.

  They walked beside the creek until Harry got tired of waiting for him to say something. She sat down on the bank where the tide was low enough for her to dangle her legs over the water. After only a quick look of concern for his designer jeans, Jimi followed suit.

  ‘Harry,’ he began, sounding very nervous, ‘I know how it must have seemed. You must have thought I was only keen to find something to invalidate Matthew’s claim to the boat yard because I wanted something out of it.’

  ‘Well, presumably you didn’t come all this way just to say hello.’

  ‘No, not at first. But look at it this way – you got the lot, I had nothing! I didn’t even know that the Harry Watling I was looking for was dead until I turned up that day.’

  ‘So what were you expecting? That he would turn round and say, “Hi, son! Welcome! Help yourself to half the boat yard?” No wonder you were so disappointed to discover the place was worthless.’

  His voice was raw. ‘I thought I was owed something. I’d already lost my mother, and the man who I grew up thinking was my father drank and smoked himself to an early death with the strain of living a lie. He thought he couldn’t have children, so when I was born he really wanted to believe he was my father. It was only after my mother’s death, when he was going through her possessions, that he was confronted with the brutal truth: the man he trusted, his former business partner, his friend, had had an affair with his wife.’

  Jimi thumped his fist into the grass and turned to her, compelling her to meet his gaze. ‘Can you imagine how betrayed he must have felt? To his credit, he never let on to me about what he knew, but his attitude changed overnight. He could barely stand living in the same house as me. Spent all his nights in the bars or at the gambling tables, trying to forget. He didn’t leave me a penny. So, yeah, I did think I was owed, big time!’

  Harry exhaled slowly, thinking back to the previous evening. Matthew had waited whilst she read the logbook, as the light slowly leached from the room. He watched her hand shaking as she placed it on the coffee table, nudging it away with one finger before she was tempted to pick it up and hurl it across the room.

  She had known that her father, drawn to the place where his father had served in the war and where he had been born, had spent many years skippering charter boats in the Far East; but the revelation of his other life filled her with anger and grief. When, at last, she’d finally given vent to the silent sobs racking her body, Matthew had gathered her up and held her to him, rocking her as if she was a child, until she stopped crying. The room was dark by then; and, when Matthew reached across to switch on one of the side lamps, they were reflected in the long night-black glass panels. Seeing herself curled into Matthew, his arm clasping her firmly to him, Harry ached to rest there, drawing comfort from his strength. In the half-light, it was easy to pretend that the tableau in the glass was real. Dragging herself away had been a bigger wrench than Matthew would ever know.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to stay?’ he’d offered, setting down his empty whisky tumbler. ‘I’ll be fine in here. You might want someone close at hand if you wake up in the night.’

  Harry pushed the thought away, knowing that in any case there would be no sleep for her that night. Matthew looked exhausted too. When he dropped a light kiss on her head, Harry bit back the urge to tell him not to go and then watched him walk away.

  The morning air was still cool, the sun not yet risen, when she found herself wandering over to George’s caravan. The door opened before she’d even thought about knocking, and she knew there had been no sleep for the old man either.

  ‘Bin on watch for you, Miss Harriet,’ he said, sitting her down with a mug of thick dark tea. And then he proceeded to fill in some of the gaps.

  The passage across the Bay of Bengal was one feared by many sailors for its typhoon zone. On this trip, feelings were running particularly high because Harry senior was in charge of bringing back two things very precious to his business partner, Scott Rutherford: his new sixty-foot yacht and his new bride, Irene.

  ‘Scott wasn’t under any illusions that Irene Tan was starry-eyed about him,’ George had told her, gruff with the effort of remembering what had lain hidden for so long. ‘But he knew she needed him and he hoped that love would follow. Irene ’ad been working as a translator and sending the money to her mother, who spent most of her husband’s small pension trying to ensure that Irene got a good education.’

  ‘So Scott was a meal ticket?’

  George sighed. ‘No. It wasn’t as harsh as that. Irene didn’t even want to leave her mother; she’d made up her mind that she would never have the chance to marry, that her duty would always be to her family. And Scott was a very persuasive man; he was always good at getting other people to do things. That’s why your Dad ended up doing all the work, whilst Scott gambled away the profits.’

  ‘Why didn’t she leave him if she’d fallen in love with Dad?’

  ‘Irene had a little sister, Daphne, who was severely disabled. Irene knew that she would need looking after for the rest of her life, and was prepared to sacrifice her own future to do it. But then Scott came along, promised he would pay for Daphne’s care and offered her a way out.’

  George smiled sadly. ‘On the face of it Scott was the prudent choice all right; cool, rational, level-headed and he was, after all, her husband. Your dad, on the other hand, was a wild card, a risk taker, an adventurer. Irene didn’t only have herself to think about, remember?’

  Harry tried to put herself in Irene’s position: torn between the man she had fallen in love with, and ensuring that the family who had invested so much in her was not left to its fate.

  ‘Well, someone clearly felt Dad had done all right. Why else would Jimi have turned up at the boat yard if he didn’t think there’d be something in it for him? Besides, how can he be so sure that Dad really is his father? If Scott and Irene had just got married, who’s to say that Jimi isn’t Scott’s son?’

  ‘Scott had been married before and knew that there was almost no chance he would ever have children. ’Course, he chose to omit that little detail from Irene, hoped she would be there just for him. Didn’t tell her about his gambling habit, neither. Oh, he might have pretended to himself that the miracle had happened that he’d fathered a child against the odds, but somewhere in his heart he must have known it wasn’t true.’

  ‘Then why didn’t he let her go?’

  ‘Because he loved her? Because he desperately wanted a son? Who’s to say? All I know is that Irene wrote to your father to set her conscience straight, to tell him about the son he didn’t know he had. Your father nearly went out of his mind with grief; but he had you and your mother to look after and, make no mistake, he loved you both. He borrowed money from wherever he could and sent it to Irene, hoping to persuade her to leave Scott and find a place to live whilst he agonised about what step to take next.’

  ‘So he was planning to leave us for her and Jimi?’

  George shook his head. ‘It didn’t get that far. What Irene didn’t tell him was that she was dying of breast cancer. Scott wrote after her death to warn your father not to come near the boy. Told him that Jimi didn’t know any different, and that it would mess him up even more. Your dad had been through so much and come out the other side, but that, coupled with the financial trouble he was in, felled him like a mighty o
ak. I don’t think he could see any other way out.’

  When there was nothing left to tell her, George had given her a rare embrace, patting her gently on the back. ‘Go and see Jimi, Miss Harriet. You need each other.’

  Harry rather doubted that, but she’d listened to George. Standing with her half-brother, it was impossible to still the vortex of emotions swirling round her brain. The effort made her infinitely weary. How could either of them be free or ever reach some sort of understanding, when the secrets of their being were lost in the past? And all because of two people caught up in a brief, bright passion, unknowing – uncaring even – of the long shadows their love affair would cast down the years.

  It was too much. Abruptly, she got to her feet. ‘You got what you came for, Jimi; the yard’s half yours. I’ll get my solicitor to sort out the paperwork.’

  ‘Harry!’ Jimi came after her as she walked away. She kept walking and he sped up a little to stand in front of her. ‘Harry, that’s not what I want any more. It’s not important to me.’

  She was crying, but she didn’t care. Jimi reached out and tried to grab hold of her, but she pushed him away.

  ‘The boat yard might not be important to you, but it’s all I’ve got to offer. Now all you have to do is decide what you’re going to do with your share. And let me tell you that George is staying with me. And if you ever, ever, put temptation under his nose again, in the form of a bottle of a gin, I’ll really make you wish you’d never been born!’

  This time he didn’t try to follow.

  The invitation to the film festival finale at Samphire sat on the table in her hall for a week. Matthew had tried to deliver it by hand, but Harry, lurking out of sight in the hallway, had waited until she was sure he’d disappeared before creeping round to the front door to see what bombshell might be lying at her feet. Now, sick of looking at it, she threw it in the bin.

  Her poor mother had been hopelessly equipped to deal with life without the man who had taken all the decisions for her. Coping with her loss, trying to run the business – with a daughter watching her every move to see if she was doing everything the way Daddy would have wanted – and nursing her dreadful secret. No wonder Maeve had given up and fled!